Cancelled DJs, Spilt Meat Trays, Protesting Boy Scouts, and Other Things That Can Go Wrong With Charity Events

It's over, kids. Put a fork in it. It's done.

Relay for Life was Friday night and Saturday morning and I am still recovering. I was awake for 24 hours straight, and was on my feet for around 18 hours straight. The next day wasn't so bad; yesterday and today have been brutal. My body is sore and my mind is fuzzy. But my heart...well, it's not so fuzzy.

I guess all in all Relay was a success. It looks like our total will be a pinch above last year's fundraising total of $43,000. And by pinch, I mean pinch. Like maybe just a few dollars over. Which means we didn't make our goal of $50,000.

What will haunt me about this Relay though is all the things that went wrong. We've been plagued by bad luck from the beginning of our Relay planning. One of our committee members had his second cancer diagnosis this year (he has an excellent prognosis and was back to work within a month of surgery), another lost her mom to cancer, and several of us had immediate family members with other significant health problems. We had a "phantom" sponsor who disappeared 2 months after agreeing to be one of our presenting sponors for $2,500. We saw 2 ACS staff partners move on to different jobs and went several months with no contact helping us at the ACS. We had to wing it with small numbers and no outside help. A fitness instructor cancelled her program a week before, and we also had a protest from a parent in the boy scout troop that volunteered to light the hundreds of luminaria bags needed at the luminaria ceremony. The parent objected to the scouts helping out because the American Cancer Society supports stem cell research. The scouts had to drop out after this protest, leaving us hanging and leaving me royally pissed off. Thankfully, replacements were found the day before and things were looking OK.

And then there was Friday night itself. Before I even talk about it I think I need a shot of something...ahhh, much better. Friday night was the stuff interventions are made of. It would have driven a Mormon to pull a bender.

Things were going fine at first. We had a lot of help getting the field set up, and things were on schedule. However, all week I had had this feeling that the DJ was going to cancel. I couldn't shake this feeling. There was no logical explanation for it; the DJ worked at one of our elementary schools and did the event for us last year and was happy to be on board again. He had confirmed with me before school let out. But the feeling that he was going to cancel was so strong that I had asked our head custodian to make sure I could get into the office where our school's portable sound system is and brought my laptop just in case.

Good thing I have a little spidey sense. At 4:30, an hour and a half before the Relay started, the DJ came up to me while I was getting the cafeteria set up for the survivor reception to tell me he had just gotten out of the hospital and was under orders to not be there. He couldn't reach me by phone, so he violated the orders long enough to come up to school to tell me in person. He had just been diagnosed with a serious heart problem and had been hospitalized all week. I felt terrible for him; he's younger than I am and it sounds like he has a long road ahead of him. I felt terrible for us, too; even with my back-up plan, it was a bad situation. The portable sound system is not very powerful, and the music I have on my laptop isn't exactly the most exciting stuff to keep people walking for 6 hours.

I got the system set up and working with just a few minutes to spare until the opening ceremony. In the meantime, our assistant superintendent heard of our situation and made a few calls; he somehow found an available DJ with connections to our schools who could be there by 7 and work until 11. So for 4 hours we had a professional. I had some good friends bail me out after that; we still had to use my laptop and the crappy sound system, but they played DJ and brought their CDs from home. God bless them.

I also had heard that our survivor reception chair had an accident with the meat tray and fell with it; cold cuts flew all over our cafeteria. He had enough time to go to Kroger and get more food, but he went down pretty hard himself and had to go home to recuperate and left the reception to a skeleton crew of volunteers.

Our staff partner from the ACS also mysteriously disappeared while we were still trying to finalize the accounting so we could announce the highest fundraising team and individual (she told our accountant she was going to her car to nap at 3am, but she never came back and we couldn't find her car anywhere in the lot.) She wasn't much help, anyway, but she did have the spreadsheet we had used for totals on her laptop and without it, our poor accountant had to go back and tally everything by hand.

It finally was over, and it seemed people had a good time. But for something that sucked so much of my life for one year, I can't help but be disappointed that we didn't make our goal. I don't know; the whole comedy of errors has left a bitter taste in my mouth (or is that the beer I've been drinking ever since?).

Hopefully time will change my perspective and I will see Relay 2007 as the worthwhile fundraising experience it was.

Until then, keep the Bud Selects coming.